The following part is from the book: “Nietzsche: 99 everyday philosophy lessons” by Allan Percy
“The most certain way to corrupt youth is to teach them to admire more those who have the same opinion than those who have a different one”
The success of sects, football clubs, and many political parties reveals that people feel more comfortable in a community where thinking is decided in advance.
Thinking is challenging work, which is why schools don’t teach how to think, and philosophy is increasingly disappearing from the curriculum.
The reasonable consequence of not thinking is to adopt the guidelines of others. From the unique thinking of each race, dissenting opinions are perceived as a threatening field, when only those who see the world differently from us can look us in the face.
Additionally, narrowing our mental universe to a single perspective causes us to constantly clash with those who walk other paths, which is another source of stress.
An exercise to shake off the habit of single-mindedness would be to occasionally buy a different newspaper than the one we usually read, listen to a radio station with a different political leaning, or read an author with whom we disagree.